Microsoft Teams have been consistent in innovating and providing solutions for everyone in terms of efficient and effective collaboration in meetings and work far back when there was still no pandemic.
When COVID-19 happened, they had the urgency to test their research and theories about remote work meetings and hybrid work setups.
Related: Microsoft Teams’ Helpful Changes For Remote Work In 2023
Their goal is to recreate and redesign conference rooms and office spaces aligned with the future of work where remote and in-office employees can take part in business success equally through inclusive meetings.
In this article, you will have an idea of how Microsoft Teams planned to recreate hybrid work in terms of online communication and collaboration.
Microsoft researchers have been investigating remote meetings since the 1990s. As Abigail Sellen, a cognitive scientist and deputy director at Microsoft Research Cambridge UK said:
“There’s this long trajectory that plays into what we’re doing now”
Today, Microsoft Teams especially its product teams are striving to serve people the replica of the feeling that workers feel when everything is in the physical office working, and here are some of their conference room features that you might want to adopt for your office:
To enhance eye contact and create a more realistic environment during remote meetings, Microsoft has incorporated a content layout that places the video feeds of remote attendees at the bottom of the screen, at eye level.
Meeting participants can collaborate on creating an agenda, notes, and tasks. These items can be modified and quickly shared with all attendees, and are also visible to those participants who are present in the office.
During the presentation, Teams had an idea to show the remote meeting presenter’s head and shoulder alongside or in front of the content being presented.
To enhance non-verbal communication, particularly for those who are working remotely, meeting participants have the option to send emojis that will appear on the screen during the meeting.
With AI-powered conference room cameras and speakers, meeting participants’ faces will be zoomed in when they’re talking and the AI speaker will automatically transcribe the words they let off of their mouth in real-time.
During their research, several factors have been identified by Microsoft researchers that contribute to the challenges of remote meetings, such as audio quality issues, uncertainty about one's own audio and visual presentation, and the absence of non-verbal cues due to the limitations of video calls.
As Jaime Teevan, chief scientist at Microsoft said:
“The risk of hybrid meetings is that in-person attendees become anonymous faces in a room, while remote attendees are left speaking into a void, not knowing if they are seen or heard, or how to jump in and take a turn. If things return to the old normal, we will have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a new and better future of work.”
However, high-tech communication and collaboration tools that have been developed in this day and age can surely ais these challenges and bring remote work meeting participants’ video conferencing experience into a more seamless and innovative one.
This is why Microsoft Teams also invested in communication and collaboration tools they think can elevate their business process such as conference room cameras.
Businesses today rely on Unified Communication and Collaboration Platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams and collaboration tools like video conference cameras to cater to their needs when communicating with their team members, and clients, and lead online.
This is the reason why Zoom and Teams are continuously improving their business and spending more time on research and development as well as telecommunications companies where they develop products that can adapt to the ever-changing needs of all workplaces.
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In conclusion, Microsoft Teams has been at the forefront of innovation in terms of efficient and effective collaboration in meetings and work for many years. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for remote work solutions, and Microsoft Teams rose to the challenge, utilizing their extensive research and theories about remote work meetings and hybrid work setups.
Their goal is to recreate conference rooms and office spaces that are inclusive of both remote and in-office employees, and they have developed several features to help achieve this goal, such as the eye-level content layout, fluid components, remote presenter's head and shoulders, and floating emojis.
Microsoft Teams is dedicated to creating a new and better future of work, where remote and in-office employees can participate equally in business success.